The A(mateur)M(iniature)Painter

Disclaimer: I do not endorse knockoff miniatures of any variety. They take profits away from the hard working creators and lower chances of these creators realizing their dream. I do not knowingly purchase knock-off miniatures and my purchase of KDM knock-off miniatures was done before knowing what KDM was. I have since only purchased from the registered retailer or from those whom have purchased from said retailer. Now that that's out of the way... By the time I grabbed my brushes again, Turkey Day had just past, and I just wanted to try something new. So after the Sunstalker, I wanted to do a bit of practicing without caring so much about mucking things up so I grabbed my knockoff Paladin Variant miniature and went to town. Presenting: my first KDM knock-off painted miniature! Before I knew fully about Kingdom Death, I had been randomly searching the web for interesting miniatures to paint, and I ran across a few sellers on eBay selling really detailed, sexualized ...

"Once sky had no day. There was a Shadow that was sad, it could only play in small light of a lantern. The Shadow found a hole in the sky and decided to steal enough lanterns to fill it. It took many generations, and when it was done the shadow slept under its big light, dreaming dreams about how it would play. When it awoke, all of the light was gone! At the center of the hole in the sky, was a tiny shinning entity, with a great big mouth. The shadow names the tiny thing the sun and they played forever."  - Excerpt from Kingdom Death: Monster - Sunstalker Expansion By mid November, 2018, I had begun to get antsy about painting a new KDM miniature, and in full blown collection mode. At the time, all expansions were unavailable from the Kingdom Death Store, so I scowered until I found a Sunstalker expansion available from Ebay. After winning the bid, I soon got the expansion and about a week before Thanksgiving, I had the miniature put together. All I needed to do ...

The Devil Satan Miniature was a special offer that became first available from the Kingdom Death Store last Halloween in 2018. This was one of 2 miniatures that I purchased during this special event (the other was the Twilight Knight Halloween Edition Miniature that was showcased in the previous blog post). This was somewhat serendipitous; This special was an interesting one; the special ran for $50 and came with 2 separate pinup miniatures. However, unlike the norm, one was 30mm while the other was 50mm (see picture below). Anyway, by now it was mid November and I wanted to paint another miniature and i was debating on one of the Devil Satan miniatures. Ultimately I decided to paint the 30mm miniature for 2 reasons: 1. It was usable for the game while the 50mm was made more for just for miniature painter hobbyists (not a bad thing). 2. The larger 50mm miniature has penises coming out of the pumpkin. At the time, I wasn't ballsy enough to do a miniature penis justice....

Last Halloween, the Kingdom Death Shop had a special sale that included Halloween themed miniatures. I thought this was cool; the miniatures that were being sold had cool promo gear to go along with KDM, and so I got a few of them, including the Halloween Special Pinup Twilight Knight. Pictures courtesy of my better half. She's better at taking good pictures than I am. I made the purchase late October and had to wait about 14 days till the order was even fulfilled. Lon story short, I didn't get a chance to start painting this version of Allison until late October, 2018. Frame of Reference As always, I wanted to stay true to the art direction, or at least the central color palette theme. With this one, I wanted to focus on going a bit darker with the base skin tone so that I had more to work with when it came to highlights later on. I went light with air-brushing highlights given the darker palette. I put a bit of extra focus on the base, gi...

"There once was a man who could not hide his fear. He wore a mask that transformed his cowardice to rage. In turn, the man transformed into a monster All that remained was a devouring fury that stalked the night, collecting the fearful faces of others." - Excerpt from Kingdom Death: Monster, Butcher Showdown After painting the Pinup Sci-Fi Twilight Knight miniature, I took a bit of (unwanted) time off from miniature painting. By late October/early November, 2018, I got some free time and so chose to try another monster miniature. In the regular KDM campaign, after encountering the Screaming Antelope, the Butcher becomes the next monster that is encountered. Given this, I wanted to try painting the Butcher.  I learned something interesting about this miniature as I painted it: it was a hell of a lot of fun! I've enjoyed painting all my miniatures so far, but sometimes I felt frustration at my lacking skills, or sometimes fatigue from staring at t...

So I didn't get enough Twilight Knight with the last miniature (and I had this one made anyway) so by early October, 2018 I went ahead and began painting the Pinup Sci-Fi Twilight Knight miniature. Unfortunately, overall, I'm happier with my previous attempt versus this one. As usual, I wanted to try to emulate the artist's design for the miniature. Given the really light coloring of the artist rendition, I didn't do a lot of shading for this miniature. Conversely, given how light the color scheme was, any dry-brush highlighting that I did didn't show up too well in the pictures.   One new technique that I tried that I hadn't really messed with beforehand was the use of paint shining effects that are available through The Army Painter website. If you note the picture above, the character has pale blue lighting elements on the costume, so to emulate this, I painted a few parts on the character as well as the sword a very light blue and applied...

So back to the 30mm miniatures. It's late September (or early October?) 2018 and I recently purchased a few pin-up miniatures from the Kingdom Death Web Store  and I was anxious to paint them immediately. Presenting the Detective Twilight Knight Pin-up miniature! Original artist's rendering The Detective Twilight Knight Pin-up is one of a few different renderings of the Allison Twilight Knight KDM miniature. There's some lore behind the character, and the character itself can be used in variations to the Kingdom Death: Monster campaign. I've painted a few of the models and will post them later on. I chose this miniature because of the style. Many of the KDM miniatures are representative of a quasi- medieval fantasy universe. This miniature forgoes that style in exchange for a more modern, police theme. It was different, the promo cards that came with it were intriguing, and so I wanted to give this one a try. As normal, I wanted to capture the ...

"There was once a monster who was shunned by its creator and left to wander the darkness. Lost in the world of humans, it was driven insane in its attempts to comprehend them. Now, the only reality it accepts exists deep inside it hollow, broken mind." - Excerpt from Kingdom Death: Monster, Lion Knight Showdown By early October, 2018, I was getting restless and wanted to get another monster miniature painted. I had a lot to choose from but in the end I wanted to try one of the humanoid monsters. I had recently purchased the Lion Knight Expansion from Ebay (they were sold out on the Kingdom Death Shop website at the time). This monster didn't have a detailed art design like many of the individual miniatures available, so I scanned the web for some inspiration. In the end, I found this site and I loved how the artist interpreted the miniature, so I copied much of the art design. You know what they say, "imitation is the highest form of flattery" or s...

The next miniature that I decided to paint was the Pinup Order Knight. This is usually the section that I post a blurb from the game that articulates the miniature, but I couldn't find anything. Poo. So I'll make my own. "This miniature could have come out better. What's up with the eyes?" - KDM painter Not the best quote, but it's true. I chose this miniature next because of the action in the stance of the miniature as well as the unique design of the base. I think I painted this miniature around the end of September, 2018. As usual, I painted the miniature based on the original art. This time, I went ahead and took a picture of the art card for comparison. Hopefully me take a pic of this doesn't break copyright laws... I first wanted to get the details down pat. Fun fact: the eyes used to look worse! I like the base color theme for this miniature, but I could have spend more time on the shading and highlighting details...